Affiliate Marketing Tutorials and Reviews | Search Engine Optimization for Beginners-OnPage Optimization

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners-OnPage Optimization

Onpage Optimization

First the basics….it is all about the tags….

If you have been blogging, you are probably already aware of tagging. SEO wise, there are a couple tags that greatly influence search engine rankings.

Tag Mantra- Less is always more

Before I go into the basics, I want to make it clear that writing for the search engines is an art all to itself. Simply put, the search engines don’t care about what you have to say or how good your content is.

The search engines #1 motive when crawling your site is to find out what your site is about. You will find that I will repeat the next statement several times throughout this report. I do it because it is that important.

The search engine robot is looking for a way to categorize your site. It wants to know what your site is about. In other words, the robot doesn’t care if you have spent 3 hours trying to find a title for your website. All that it wants are clues as to how it should categorize your site.

The easiest way to give the search engines what they want is to break it down into the simplest terms possible. And that is to give it to them, one keyword at a time. I will explain more about this in the following section.

If you get cute and try to write solely for people, you will have a long road trying to rank for your keyword. Case in point, all thing equal, a title tag that reads “bathroom ceramic tiles” will outrank “my site is about bathroom additions and ceramic tiles” all day long.

Title Tag For SEO

    Title Tag- This tag is exactly what it claims to be…it is the title of your website. The title tag to your site should tell the search engine exactly what your website is about. Most webmasters get this wrong immediately.

    For instance, a buddy of mine who is running a local audi automotive business had his title tag as “Welcome to Brad’s Audi Automotive”. If a google spider visited this page, they would immediately surmise that this site must be about Brad’s Audi Automotive. That’s fine. But my buddy wants to rank locally with “Audi Repair in Memphis”.

    Someone querying this long tail may or may not find my buddy’s site. Worse, I could easily outrank him (all things equal) right out of the gate by making my title tag “Audi Repair in Memphis”.

    ~Some other notes in regards to the title tag~

    Google ranks title tag in regards to importance going from first to last. In other words, your primary keyword should always be the first thing in the title tag, followed by other keywords rated by you from most important to least important.

    Google also ranks the title tag in terms of the number of keywords- If you are really gunning for “Audi Repair in Memphis”, then your work would be best served making this the only thing in your title tag. For every keyword you add, it diminishes the effectiveness of your primary keyword. Remember, google is looking for the most relevant page for the search query…..Less keywords means more relevancy in the eyes of google.

    Remember this mantra….Less is more. If you are going after a highly competitive keyword, it is better to go large solely using the primary keyword (I will explain why in the advanced on-page optimization module). Likewise, if you are shooting for a long tail micro-niche, then make your title tag the keyword itself and that’s it. No, “welcome to…” or anything else that is cute.

Description tag for Search Engine Optimization

    If you have used wordpress or blogger before, then you have most likely used a visible description tag for your blog. And if you didn’t know a bit about SEO, you description tag would look something like “this site is about ……..” or something cutesy that doesn’t say much about your site, like a quote. If you have built a static website via website builder (such as a WYSIWYG editor), then chances are you have written the same.

    The description tag is supposed to be a little quip about what your site is about. The problem with that is that most people want to develop a sentence or two about it and usually this does nothing in terms of search engine rankings. Once again, less is more in this case.

    If your site is about “bathroom ceramic tiles”, then the description tag should be “bathroom ceramic tiles” and a few other latent semantic keywords that are in line with your keyword.

    Alternately, if you are building an authority site on “home flooring”, then you should use “home flooring” as your keyword with some other latent semantic keywords as well.

    Once again, just like the title tag, you want to put your most important keywords at the beginning and follow from the most important to the least important. And once again, google places weight (at least for now) on how many keywords are in your description (less is more weight).

    What sucks is that some search engines will actually use your description as the “teaser text” in the search results. This is not a good thing if you description tag reads “bathroom ceramic plates”. The good news is that google will probably dismiss the description tag as the teaser text and choose something on your site instead.

Other Tags of Interest For SEO

  • There are some other tags that are thrown around. Header tags (<h1>,<h2>,ect.) are used in most pages and google places more importance on what is in these tags. Less is more. A cutesy <h1> tag like “The best tiles for your money” simply isn’t going to carry as much weight as “The best ceramic tiles for your money” or better still “ceramic tiles and how they stack up against other bathroom tiles.”

  • Emphasis, colored, boldened, and underlined tags- All of these tags mean one thing to google….you are trying to emphasize or bring attention to this section so therefore, it must be important.

  • Anchor text tags- Simply put, these are link tags that are going out to other sites OR interconnecting to other parts of your site. These can be powerful because they give google clues as to what your site is about (since it is on your page) and more importantly, what the page is about that you are linking to (which can be real powerful when you are keyword sniping.

That is it for this little beginner’s tutorial. If you gain nothing out of this, remember that less is always more in the eyes of the search engines.

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